If Clinton wasn't willing enough to do Obama's dirty work when it comes to attacking Israel, we are now getting a glimpse at what Hagel as Secretary of State will be like as regards Israel. This man with his ludicrous comments about 'caged palestinians' and support for Iran has no sympathy whatsoever for the US only ally in the middle east. All this whilst Israel is faced with radical states around all its borders (Jordan is maintaining the coldest of peace with Israel whilst attacking it in international forums, all in a possibly vain attempt to appease and hold back the islamist tide there), and a raging civil war on its northern border with Syria.
Just last week Obama gave yet another hint as to his visceral hatred of Israel when saying that Israel's 'behaviour' will bring about its destruction. Obama is presently delivering 200 Abrams tanks and 20 F16's to Egypt to underline his 'goodwill' towards Israel. Obama is not on record criticising any other country in such terms as he's used against Israel and its leaders.

The next four years are going to be rocky for Israel (to some extent mitigated by ), as I forecast time and again before Obama's re-election by an ever naive US public, victim of a snake oil salesman. Like that great country the USA, Israel will still be there and thriving long after this administration and its president have become just a footnote in history.

By Rachel Hirshfeld

In recently revealed comments, President Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of defense Chuck Hagel made staggering accusations against Israel, alleging that the Jewish state is keeping the “Palestinians caged up like animals.”

Hagel was quoted as making the comments on January 12, 2003 by The Lincoln Journal Star, The Washington Free Beacon revealed on Tuesday.

The highly controversial nominee does not elaborate on the claim or explain how he believes Israel is keeping “Palestinians caged up like animals,” according to the Journal Star report. The comment is, however, consistent with his long anti-Israel and anti-Jewish record.

In 2007, he made a similar accusation, saying that Israel has kept the Palestinian people “chained down for many, many years.”

Wednesday, 30 January 2013

In this country, probably the most popular festival is the rejoicing over the finding of water in the depths of the earth. Now the day had come when the threat of drought had been removed fromt he Negev. Water had been found. Yet on the selfsame day a terrible sand storm blew up in the South.

Two men were standing at the big wheel, which sets the water flowing. The one was the oldest of the settlers, a man who had been a leader of the settlement movement for years. The other, much younger, was the pioneer, representative of the men who always heed the call and leave their families and farms whenever they are needed by the homeland. When the men moved the wheel and a pillar of water spurted up into the air, you could see the Negev sandstorm retreating. The tremendous sand-clouds fell back when they met the stream of living water. Man had celebrated his victory.

A woman sitting next tom me started weeping. She told me she was a Gentile from the city of Zagreb in Yugoslavia. The next day, when I visisted her at home, she showed me a picture of the neighborhood where she had been born: "This part of the city has been destroyed completely by the Germans." I could understand how a person who had lost his own home could feel to the depth of hi soul the building up of a country.

After the ceremony a man stopped by our car and asked for a lift back to town. "I am a newcomer to the country" he said and mentioned his name. His family is quite well known in the country, therefore his exellent Hebrew was no surprise to us. But we couldn't understand why he had only arrived recently. After a short silence he brought out a picture of a tombstone over the grave of a falledn Israeli soldier. "This is what brought me to Israel" he said.

His son had fallen at Negba. He was their only child and had been brought up in South America. When the War of Liberation began, he volunteered for the Israel Army. He gave us all the details. How the son had left home. How he fell. How the news had reached him.

He was silent for a moment, then added: "We received the news on a Thursday. The following Sunday I buried my wife. There was nothing left for me. Now I'm here, all alone." Then he, the serious adult, started crying in front of us strangers.

When we reached town, we asked him. "Where is your home?"

"Home? Well, if you can call it that," he said. "I am all alone, I have no home." He walked away from the car in the twilight, moving hastily.

But before he left us he had said one more thing: The next day would be his wedding anniversary, so he had come to celebrate the water festival in the Negev.

(Oops: In the bitter war of Israel's independence 60,000 soldiers dies, equivalent to 1% of the population. The next time arabs and their sympathisers talk about Israel's supposed ethnic cleansing of 'peaceful' arabs, rememeber this statistic.)

Tuesday, 29 January 2013

Deborah Dayan was mother to general Dayan, architect of the 1956 defeat of Egypt, the man who reinvigorated the Israeli army after a period of stagnation following the 1948 war. Deborah Dayan was herself a chalutz who carried out important work helping to absorb immigrants, who set up an industry to help sephardi artisans make a living out of their crafts.Dayan also wrote short articles for 'Davar' later collected and published as 'Pioneer' about her experiences, some of which i'll post here. The book is long out of print, but well worth finding for the wealth of information about Israel around the time of independence.

In seeking permission to republish extracts from this long forgotten book I did an unsuccessful internet search of the publisher, Masada Press. I can only conclude the publisher has gone out of business.

A Baker Woman (Pioneer p138-9)

She found me at home. She had never filled in a questionnaire and was not on file as a welfare case. She spoke a fresh and lively Yiddish. She began by excusing herself for asking me for a place in an Old Age Home.

She had come from Roumania and her old and lined face still testified to her former great beauty.
"I know there are more urgent cases than I" she said "Heaven forbid, I'm not complaining. My children are looking after me, all Jewish mothers should have such children. But please: just listen to me and try to understand."

She was born in a little town in Roumania. Her father was a baker and she had helped him from childhood. Then she fell in love with a worker at the bakery and they got married. They had gone on working at the bakery and later it passed onto them.

Children were born. They lived a hard life, but they were happy. And then the First World War broke out. Her husband was conscripted and she, the mother of four children had to work hard for the upkeep of her family. The war came to an end. Her husband returned - a hopeless invalid, who was incapable of working.
"I loved him when he was young and healthy, I loved him when he was sick" she went on. More children were born.

When she was, at last, left a widow with a house full of children, she had to work harder than ever. Then the Communists took over in Roumania, the bakery was taken away from her and she became a salaried worker. She worked faithfully under the new conditions and was known as a good baker everywhere.

When she finally reached Israel, she immediately took a job baking Halloth (Sabbath loaves). It was night work, but she didn't mind. At times she felt as if she was slowing down, that the dough appeared heavier every day. Until, one night, she left the bakery to rest a little and never went back. She felt she had done enough. Her daughter took her job, and she stayed at home, looking after the children.
Everything was fine, she wasn't complaining, she felt wanted and loved - but she felt "she just wanted to sit back quietly and remember, I said. just sit like this," she said, and leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms on her chest.

"Please, arrange for me to go to an Old Age Home. Don't you think I deserve it?"
"I am sure you do," I said.

Monday, 28 January 2013

Here Golda Meir recounts about how often uneducated and ill people from many countries in the diaspora were absorbed into Israel, people who could at that time not contribute to the state. The State of Israel was desperately poor after having survived the war and needing to give defence needs a high priority. So rationing was introduced in order to share the burden equally so as to give everyone, including the newcomers the bare minimum necessary to survive. Golda recounts how Schools and clinics had to be improvised in the face of many diseases from which the newcomers were suffering from, and yet the doctors and nurses managed to cope, and Israelis did not complain, because they were helping their own people.

From Golda Meir, My Life p214-216:

How did they keep themselves alive? They became master craftsmen, silversmiths, jewellers, weavers and carpenters. All over Israel today you can see and buy their delicate, exotic filigree work. Of course, those who couldn't keep their families alive by craftsmanship became itinerant workmen and pedlars, but for all of them life was more than degrading; it was also very precarious. Out of every 1,000 Jewish children born in Yemen, nearly 800 died, and all orphaned Jewish boys were forced to convert.But somehow the Jewish community of Yemen never disappeared, and every now and then Yemenite Jews either were given permission by the imam to leave Yemen or they escaped from it across the desert into Aden, hoping from there to reach the Holy Land - though very few ever did.
Still, when I came to Palestine in 1921, there were already some Yemenite Jews there. They had learned of the renewed settlement activity in Palestine from Shmuel Yavnieli, an East European Jew whohad made his way through Yemen as early as 1908, finding these 'lost remnants' of his people and bringing them the message of the return to Zion. I was fascinated by them. I knew that they were capable of great feats of strength, but to me they looked like dar-skinned, fragile dolls in their colourfull traditional clothing (in Yemen they were not allowed to wear the same clothes as Arabs). Most of the Yemenite women in Palestine then wore lovely hooded garments and dresses over narrow, beautifully embroidered trousers, while the men, all of whom had long earlocks, were dressed in loose striped robes. During the war years, a few thousand Yemenite Jews who received permission from the British to leave Aden and enter Palestine sailded up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal. But the majority were still trapped.

In 1947, a few days safter the UN vote on partition, there were dreadful Arab riots in Aden, and the situation of the Jews inside Yemen itself also worsened. In their despair and terror, thousands of Yemennite Jews - hearing that the State of Israel was at last coming into being - finally took their lives in their own hands and fled. They left their few possessions behind, gathered up their families and - like the biblical Children of Israel - began to walk out of slavery into freedom, believing implicitly that somehow or other they would get to the Holy Land.

They walked in groups of thirty or forty, set upon by Arab brigands, eating only the pitta (flat Arab bread), honey and dates they could carry and paying exorbitant ransoms to the various desert sultanates they passed en route for each man, newborn baby and Bible. Most of them did reach Aden and the camps organized for them by the Joint Distribution Committee and staffed by Israeli doctors and social workers, where they rested, prayed and read their Bibles. But since the Egyptians had closed the Suez Canal to Israeli shipping, there was only one way for them to reach Israel 0 and that was by air. Each day, 300 or 600 Yemenite Jews were flown to Israel packed into giant converted transport planes that flew them along the Red Sea route in what soon became known as 'Operation Magic Carpet'! That airlift went on all through 1949 and, by the time it ended, it had brought 48,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel.

Sometimes I used to go to Lydda and watch the planes from Aden touch down, marvelling at the endurance and faith of their exhausted passengers. 'Had you ever seen a plane before?" I asked one bearded old man. 'No', he answered. 'But weren't you very frightened of flying?'' I persisted. 'No', he said again, very firmly. 'It is all written in the Bible'. In Isaiah. ''They shall mount up with wings of eagles.'' And standing there on the airfield, he recited the entire passage to me, his face lit with the joy of a fulfilled prophecy - and of the journey's end. Today there are virtually no more Jews in Yemen, and the scars of their long exile have begun to fade. Ben-Gurion used to say that his happiest day would come when a Yemenite Jew would be appointed chief-of-staff of the Israel Defence Forces, and I myself think that day is not far off now (Ooops - that has still not happened, but Moshe Levy was of Iraqi extraction, Shaul Mofaz - persian).

Reading over what I have just written I am still amazed by the sheer number of the immigrants we absorbed. but we weren't dealin gwith abstract numbers then. It wasn't the arithmetic of the Law of the Return - the bill passed by the Knesset in July 1950 giving the right of immigration to all Jews and automatic Israeli citizenship to all Jewish immigrants - that most concerned us. What worried us was how were we ever going to feed, clothe, house, educate and generally care for those thousands of immigrants. How and with what? By the time I arrived back in Israel, there were 200,000 people living (if that's the word) in tents all over the country, more often than not two families to a tent - and not necessarily families from the same country or even the same continent. apart fr om the fact that none of the services we improvised in such a rush really worked well or were geared for so many thousands of people, there were also a great many sick, under nourished and handicapped people who might have managed better had they been housed differently but who just couldn't cope at all under the circumstances. The man who had lived through yeaers of Nazi slave labour, survived the DP camps and braved the trip to Israel and who was, at best, in poor health and, at worst, badly damaged physically and entitled to the best possible conditions, found himself and his family (if he still had one) living in unbearable proximity with people with whom he didn't even have a common language. Nine times out of ten, he even regarded his newneighbours as primitive because they had never seen a flush toilet. Even then he might have pulled himself together faster if we had been able to give him a job at once or move him into more adequate housing or somehow give him the sense of permanence for which, like all reugees, he longed. Or consider the illiterate woman from Libya or Yemen or the caves of the Atlas Mountains who was stuck with her children in a draughty, leaky tent with Polish or Czech Jews who prepared their food differently, ate things that made her feel sick and, by her standards, weren't even Jews at all, either because they weren't observant or else because their prayers and rituals were totally unfamiliar to her.

In theory, non of this should have mattered. In theory, no over crowding, no misery, no cultural or intellectual differences should have been at all important for people who had experienced the Holocaust or for those who had literally walked out of Yemen through the robber-infested, scorching desert. But theory is for theoreticians. People are people, and the tensions and discromforts of those hideous tent cities that I saw everywhere in 1949 were really unbearable. Something had to be done at once about housing, and jobs had to be created for those unhappy people as soon as possible. Their health and their nutriion were taken care of more or less adequately: the TB, trachoma, ring-worm, malaria, typhoid, dysentery, measles and pellagra that the immigrants brought with them were all being coped with, though I don't know how our overworked and exhausted doctors and nurses did it. And all of the tent cities had 'schools' of some sort where Hebrew was being taught intensively. But in 1949 housing seemed an insurmountable problem.

as for our resources, despite the magnificent response of world Jewry, there was never enough money. Thanks to our neighbours, our defence budget had to stay sky high, and anyhow all the other essential needs of the state had to be met somehow. We couldn't close down our schools or our hospitals or our transport or our industries (such as they were) or put too tight a rein in any way on the state's development. So everything had to be done at the same time. But there were things that we could do without after all - so we did without them. We rationed almost everything - food, clothing and shoes - and got used to the idea of an austerity that lasted for years. Recently I came across one of my own ration books, a drab little booklet issued by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry in 1950, and I recalled the hours I stood in line for a few potatoes or three eggs or the frozen fish on which we feasted so gratefully - when we got it. Luckily, I still had clothes from my stay in Russia. But most Israelis had a very hard time indeed. Their standard of living dropped drastically. Whatever had been sufficient for one family in 1948 now had to be shared with two or three other families. Oldtimers, who had just emerged from months of a terrible war, might have been forgiven for rebelling against the new demands made on them. But no one rebelled. A few people said that perhaps the immigrants should wait wherever they were until times were better here. But no one, no one at all, ever suggested that the burden was too heavy or that the infant state might collapse under it. The national belt was tightened - and tightened again - and still we all managed to breathe. And about one thing we were all in agreement: without those Jews, Israel wasn't worth having.

Sunday, 27 January 2013

The week when we hear about Britain and France merrily bombing away at Malian cities without a care as to civilian casualties is also when the Sunday Times sees fit to publish an anti-semitic cartoon worthy of Der Stuermer or of anti-semitic cartoonist Latuff.

Anyone who defends Israel comes across British Holocaust obsessed people. The usual line is how could jews do to palestinians what was done to them, an obnoxious distortion of history by those who would like to repeat it.
This week saw another British MP David Ward compare the Jewish state to the Nazi regime. Ward chose to reveal himself as an anti-semite whilst attempting to cover himself in the protective garb of the Holocaust, of having visited Auschwitz not once, but twice. He now feels he can speak out from behind his Auschwitz veteran's suit of armour; saying in effect 'I can't be anti-semitic because I pay homage to Holocaust victims', whilst not forgetting to draw the usual condemnation reserved for jews who, 'do to the poor palestinians what was done to them'.

“Having visited Auschwitz twice– once with my family and once with local
schools –… I am saddened that the Jews, who suffered unbelievable
levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of
liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on
Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a
daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza,”

This rider of , 'how could jews who were the victims now do the same to others' is all too frequent. It is a way for anti-semites to attack the Jewish People whilst purporting to show sympathy with the greatest massacre of all time. It is an attempt to compare Israel which has to defend itself in a war where every day, arabs try to kill jews with nazis who organised the premeditated annihilation of the Jewish People.

This British MP did not just one day emerge from the woodwork with such awful comments, but is the result of at least 40 years of arab propaganda in British universities, a system which has almost totally taken on board the myth of arab ethnic cleansing from Israel. The truth is of course the opposite, arabs make up 20% of Israel's population, but when arab countries invaded Israel in 1948 they loudly trumpeted their intention to commit genocide against the jews there.

Reading Ward's website we see that he has been to Samaria and Judea. Ward doesn't say who paid for his trip (Raheem Kassam explains the funding behind this trip though; as ever saudi funded CAABU pops up), although his trip was filled with meeting with those who work
against Israel on a daily basis, Ngo's such as Oxfam and Breaking the
Silence, and of course a visit to an arab village blocked off by the security fence. Whilst berating the wicked Israelis for roadblocks and the fence which prevents access to the arab farmers reaching their lands, he forgets to mention the reason for the roadblocks and fence. No mention of the 1,000 israelis murdered by suicide bombers coming out of such villages as Ward visited. The security fence stopped the terrorists, but our British MP isn't interested in that. Wards job was to come to Israel and get more material for his preconceptions. Ward also met Mr Regev and unsurprisingly was totally unconvinced by anything Regev said to him. But at least Ward may now claim he looked at both sides. This anti-semite is a consummate propagandist if nothing else. As with his trips to Auschwitz he takes care to defend himself from criticism or any accusation of anti-semitism in service of demonising jews and Israel.
But Ward's comments on the Holocaust, in time for Holocaust Day 'outed' him, as just another jew hating Brit.

Ward seen with his activists serves a large muslim minority in Bradford .

Ward posted these ridiculous comments which reflect the depth of his indoctrination:

that of water control, the policy of controlling water is plain for all to see. As we drove along the road heading north we could see, time and time again, the small Bedouin farmers with bare, scrappy land on which there were a few goats or sheep whilst on the other side of the road we could for mile after mile see lush, green plantations and crops - surrounded by security fencing - that were being farmed by the Israeli settlers.

If this is not ethnic cleansing, then what is?

Beduin are nomadic, not farmers. Even when settled, they live by doing various businesses. So Ward's comments are strange, even for someone as convinced in his hatred of jews as he seems to be. Ward maybe feels that as he represents a large muslim minority constituency, attacking jews is the way to ingratiate himself with voters.

Chris Davies, Liberal Democrat MEP for the North-West of England, posted a message to Twitter, defending party colleague and UK Member of Parliament David Ward, who said last Friday that he is:

“saddened that the Jews (Oops- oh dear, little giveaway, that ethnic bloc of elders of zion. Don't call Chris Davies an anti-semite, he'll be only too happy to explain his words as being just a condemnation of 'zionists'....), who suffered unbelievable levels of persecution during the Holocaust, could within a few years of liberation from the death camps be inflicting atrocities on Palestinians in the new State of Israel and continue to do so on a daily basis in the West Bank and Gaza.”

'the Jews' - oh dear, a little giveaway, Davies is slipping into considering a whole people as belonging to that ethnic bloc of
elders of zion, controllers of the world, those who no matter what their political or religious affiliations are really just, 'the Jews'. So don't call Chris Davies who's done the haj to Auschwitz an anti-semite, he'll be only
too happy to explain his words as being just a condemnation of
'zionists'....
Davies posted a message Saturday on his personal Twitter account saying, “Lib Dem leadership quite wrong to 'reprimand' David Ward. Makes Nick look like being in Israel's pocket. In fact he is a fierce critic.”

Davies’ defense of Ward seems to follow his own expressed position from 2006.

"I visited Auschwitz last year and it is very difficult to understand why those whose history is one of such terrible oppression appear not to care that they have themselves become oppressors," Davies said at the time.

I'm now waiting for our 'moderate' arab friend, funder of the Munich Olympics massacre and serial holocaust denier Mr Abbas to make the pilgrimmage to Auschwitz.

British media present in Israel in droves ignore the daily arab incitement, the shootings, knifings and stonings of jews

The Sunday Times as with other mass media outlets does not publish daily palestinian arab attacks such as that today and calls for genocide against jews, published on official Palestinian Authority TV and in its newspapers. The real attempt by arabs to commit a new Holocaust does not fit the message that British anti-semites wish to convey. That Israel has fought for its life even bore its independence, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future is of no interest.

Caroline Glick found out just what it is like to debate regarding Israel in front of a well heeled British mob last week. Having been shouted down and unable to put Israel's case before supposedly well educated people she does not feel that she wishes to set foot in Britain again. Such is the reality that is Britain. Demonise Israel and praise arabs who call for the destruction of Jews and Israel. That mob are the real nazis. Were heaven forbid Israel ever to be destroyed by arabs, such indoctrinated Brits would not even blink before saying, "they brought it upon themselves."

A tiny sample of anti-semitic Holocaust cartoons below play their part in using the greatest tragedy to befall the Jewish People as a way of demonising jews and Israel further, to prepare the way for the next Holocaust.

Wednesday, 23 January 2013

It's one of the ironies of history, that jewish people having been true and effective allies in the struggle for black rights in America, are subject to the most vicious calumnies and attacks emanating from some in the US black community. This is not to say that all black americans are anti-semitic, but communal leaders such as Farakhan have had a strong influence in turning american black people against jews.And then there is Obama, whose first administration managed to pick a fight with Israel just about every week, all whilst Obama himself proclaimed loudly that he had the security of Israel at heart ($20 billions of arms sales last year to Saudi Arabia might give the lie to that one, as with supplying 200 Abrams tanks and 20 F16s this January 2013). With the undermining of arab regimes posing no threat to Israel and the promotion of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region, Obama has leveraged US policy to undermine Israel's security more than any other country since Russia brought about the wars of 1967 and 1973.

Obama and his former professor Edward Said, PLO spokesman

And Obama came out recently with the barely disguised hope that Israel will be destroyed. Obama wishes tiny Israel to divest itself of its ancient lands, the Golan, Judea and Samaria. That high land is essential to protecting Israel from arabs who never cease threatening genocide against jews and Israel.
Obama's history of friendship to palestinian arabs in Chicago, with Khalidi and Edward Said as well attending church services of voluble antisemite and anti-american pastor Jeremiah White (who justified the 9/11 massacre ) for over 20 years just serve to fill in the background of someone who wishes Israel no good.

Wright:“We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed
Nagasaki. And we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and
the Pentagon—and we never batted an eye!” Wright preached. “We
supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black south
Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done
overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards.” He
closed, invoking Malcolm X’s statement about the assassination of
J.F.K, “America’s chickens! Coming home! To roost!” Obama:

… "If Israel, a small state in an inhospitable region, becomes more of a
pariah – one that alienates even the affections of the US, its last
steadfast friend – it won't survive," Goldberg writes, paraphrasing Mr
Obama's words. "Iran poses a short-term threat to Israel's survival;
Israel's own behaviour poses a long-term one."

Is Obama on record for talking about any other country in such terms, that it is a "pariah", that it "won't survive"? Contrast this with Obama's bowing down to the Kind of Saudi Arabia, a country where blacks are enslaved and abused physically and sexually.Obama might understand a little more of Israel's security problems if he watched this (especially in light of the withdrawal from Gaza and the unending rain of missiles on Israel afterwards):

Obama however learned much about Israel through the distorting lens of Said and Khalidi. Obama still won't release transcripts of papers he wrote for Said whilst at university.

It has been said that this phenomenon of black people in the USA attacking jews even after the jewish community extended the hand of friendship in so many ways was explainable by resentment against whites, for their relative wealth, for their history of slavery, or that of many black people identifying as christians or muslims. It is said that black people might have take on board uncritically the anti-semitism preached by pastors, imams and the left .But this is not enough of an explanation as black organisations have traditionally identified with arab states at the UN even whilst arabs organised and profited from the slave trade for hundreds of years.Last year in Libya black people were hounded, beaten and killed. A post facto justification for the racist attacks was that blacks served in Libya's armed forces. Partly true (Black people however also worked in the service industries, as domestic servants, doing all sorts of menial labout), but so did Tuareg serve Ghadaffi, as well as arabs. Tuareg are not black but nomadic Berbers. They were not subject to such a frenzy of organised attacks and mass killings. Was there something about a racism that saw black people as having risen above their station in an arab land?

Warning, the video shows extreme violence by Libyans against a black man:

Martin Luther King, Jr felt a strong bond with jews. He recognised what jewish people had contributed and suffered for his cause, the cause of human rights of black people and of human rights in general. MLK did not sacrifice his friendship with the Jewish People and Israel on the altar of arab oil money (All black african states other than Kenya broke off relations with Israel in 1973 after receiving promises of aid from oil rich arab countries, promises that were rarely kept).

1)
A special bond: Martin Luther King Jr., Israel and American Jewry

by Stuart Appelbaum

Martin Luther King Jr. on July 30, 1964. Photo by Dick DeMarsico/New York World-Telegram

This year, U.S. Jews, like other Americans, mark Martin Luther King, Jr. Day by remembering him as a powerful voice against racism and for civil rights. But for Jews, Dr. King was also something else: a uniquely important ally in the fight against anti-Semitism and for a secure Israel.

Today, Dr. King’s close bond with the Jewish community is treated only as a small footnote of his life and work. But, toward the end of his life, Dr. King devoted significant time and energy to strengthening what were becoming increasingly strained ties between black Americans and U.S. Jews. One issue Dr. King was particularly concerned with was the growing mischaracterization of Zionism as racism.

Dr. King spoke and wrote often about Israel. However, the true depth of Dr. King’s commitment to Israel was readily apparent in a September, 1967 letter he sent to Adolph Held, then president of the organization I now lead, the Jewish Labor Committee. Dr. King wrote Held after the Jewish leader contacted him regarding press accounts of a conference that Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference participated in. At the meeting, strongly worded resolutions blasting Zionism and embracing the position of the Arab powers had been considered.

Understanding Held’s worries, Dr. King explained that, beyond offering opening remarks, he had no part in the conference. But, Dr. King said, had he been present during the discussion of the resolutions “I would have made it crystal clear that I could not have supported any resolution calling for black separatism or calling for a condemnation of Israel and an unqualified endorsement of the policy of the Arab powers.”

“Israel’s right to exist as a state is incontestable,” Dr. King wrote. He then added, almost prophetically, “At the same time the great powers have the obligation to recognize that the Arab world is in a state of imposed poverty and backwardness that must threaten peace and harmony.”

Referring to the stake U.S. oil companies have in the Middle East, Dr. King went on to note that “some Arab feudal rulers are no less concerned for oil wealth and neglect the plight of their own peoples. The solution will have to be found in statesmanship by Israel and progressive Arab forces who in concert with the great powers recognize fair and peaceful solutions are the concern of all humanity and must be found.”

Were Dr. King’s comments to Held intended only to soothe a miffed supporter? Hardly. In a March 25, 1968 speech to the Rabbinical Assembly, Dr. King said: “peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality.” Less than two weeks later, on April 4, Dr. King was murdered while organizing support for striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee.

We can only speculate how, had he lived, Dr. King might have helped heal the divisions between Jews and African-Americans - or even the contributions he could have made toward achieving Middle East peace. What we do know is that Dr. King’s vision of a secure Israel and a peaceful Middle East is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s. We know something else, too: that it’s up to each of us to help make it a reality. For American Jews, maybe that’s what this Martin Luther King, Jr., Day is really all about.

Stuart Appelbaum, President of the Jewish Labor Committee, is President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, UFCW.
--------------

Aptly quoting Martin Luther King, Jr. is a common way to make a point or win an argument, and it’s no surprise that his new memorial in Washington includes an “Inscription Wall” of quotes carved in stone. It’s also no surprise that the quote about critics of Zionists didn’t make the cut for inclusion in the memorial. Still, it’s been put to use on many an occasion, most recently by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last year, in his address to the Knesset on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A few years back it even cropped up in a State Department report on antisemitism. So I was perplexed to see it categorized as “disputed” on the extensive page of King quotes at Wikiquote—for better or worse, the go-to place to verify quotes. Indeed, as of this writing, it’s the only King quote so listed.

The attempt to discredit the quote has been driven by politics. In particular, it’s the work of Palestinians and their sympathizers, who resent the stigmatizing of anti-Zionism as a form of antisemitism. Just what sort of anti-Zionism crosses that fine line is a question beyond my scope here. But what of the quote itself? How was it first circulated? What is the evidence against it? And might some additional evidence resolve the question of its authenticity?

A repugnant suggestion

King’s words were first reported by Seymour Martin Lipset, at that time the George D. Markham Professor of Government and Sociology at Harvard, in an article he published in the magazine Encounter in December 1969—that is, in the year following King’s assassination. Lipset:
Shortly before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King, Jr. was in Boston on a fund-raising mission, and I had the good fortune to attend a dinner which was given for him in Cambridge. This was an experience which was at once fascinating and moving: one witnessed Dr. King in action in a way one never got to see in public. He wanted to find what the Negro students at Harvard and other parts of the Boston area were thinking about various issues, and he very subtly cross-examined them for well over an hour and a half. He asked questions, and said very little himself. One of the young men present happened to make some remark against the Zionists. Dr. King snapped at him and said, “Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”

For the next three-plus decades, no one challenged the credibility of this account. No wonder: Lipset, author of the classic Political Man (1960), was an eminent authority on American politics and society, who later became the only scholar ever to preside over both the American Sociological Association and the American Political Science Association. Who if not Lipset could be counted upon to report an event accurately? Nor was he quoting something said in confidence only to him or far back in time. Others were present at the same dinner, and Lipset wrote about it not long after the fact. He also told the anecdote in a magazine that must have had many subscribers in Cambridge, some of whom might have shared his “fascinating and moving” experience. The idea that he would have fabricated or falsified any aspect of this account would have seemed preposterous.

That is, until almost four decades later, when two Palestinian-American activists suggested just that. Lipset’s account, they wrote, “seems on its face… credible.”
There are still, however, a few reasons for casting doubt on the authenticity of this statement. According to the Harvard Crimson, “The Rev. Martin Luther King was last in Cambridge almost exactly a year ago—April 23, 1967″ (“While You Were Away” 4/8/68). If this is true, Dr. King could not have been in Cambridge in 1968. Lipset stated he was in the area for a “fund-raising mission,” which would seem to imply a high profile visit. Also, an intensive inventory of publications by Stanford University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project accounts for numerous speeches in 1968. None of them are for talks in Cambridge or Boston.

The timing of this doubt-casting, in 2004, was opportune: Lipset was probably unaware of it and certainly unable to respond to it. He had suffered a debilitating stroke in 2001, which left him immobile and speech-impaired. (He died of another stroke in 2006, at the age of 84.) Since then, others have reinforced the doubt, noting that Lipset gave “what seemed to be a lot of information on the background to the King quote, but without providing a single concrete, verifiable detail.” For just these reasons, the quote reported by Lipset was demoted to “disputed” status on King’s entry at Wikiquote.

To all intents and purposes, this constitutes an assertion that Lipset might have fabricated both the occasion and the quote. To Lipset’s many students and colleagues, the mere suggestion is undoubtedly repugnant and perhaps unworthy of a response. But I’m not a student or colleague, nor did I know Lipset personally, so it seemed to me a worthy challenge to see whether I could verify Lipset’s account. Here are the results.
One Friday evening

Bear in mind Lipset’s precise testimony: King rebuked the student at a dinner in Cambridge “shortly before” King’s assassination, during a fundraising mission to Boston. It’s important to note that Lipset didn’t place the dinner in 1968. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, so “shortly before” could just as well have referred to the last months of 1967.

In fact, King did come to Boston for the purposes of fundraising in late 1967—specifically, on Friday, October 27. Boston was the last stop in a week-long series of benefit concerts given by Harry Belafonte for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Here’s an advertisement for that tour, from the magazine Jet.

-----------

(זצ״ל) - For gentile readers, this acronym stands for 'Zecher Tsadik Livrocho' - 'A righteous man, of blessed memory', the highest accolade a jew can give to the memory of another).

Monday, 21 January 2013

One thing that the Elder of Ziyon blog has is the ability to describe matters in perspective. We all the time hear about how without the E1 strip of land the parts of Judea and Samaria that Israel will give up for a peace deal will not be 'contiguous'. Of course, as usual, even that Israel has already given arabs 80% of JS is not enough, that there must always be that little bit more. Olmert offered E1 and east Jerusalem in 2008 but it was rejected, because of the so-called 'right of return', that arabs whose grandparents may or may not have lived in Haifa and Jaffa should invade on mass. A euphemism for the destruction of Israel.

The graphic explains all, how if New York can manage to be viable, so could 'Palestine', if only there was a will to do so and thrive. Of course that will never happen because just as in Mali, in Pakistan, in Iraq and in Syria there is a blood lust in the islamist psyche, the following of a political islamic creed that is stuck in the medieval age with its need to always have a grievance, to aspire to rebuild an empire, to demonsie jews and christians and to act on hatreds.

Despite the Koran with its interminable calls to violence against 'infidels', jews and christians, not because of it, many muslims live peaceful lives in Israel and elsewhere. Moderate muslims are the people the west must encourage, that Israel should encourage.

People like Raed Salah and his northern islamic league should not be tolerated in Israel. Israel needs to become a little less tolerant of islamic fascists, even to crush them so that moderate muslims wil not be intimidated, threatened and abused, so that Israel's roads are not periodically closed because of stone throwing radicalised arabs.

There is never the willingness to forgive and forget the past, in which jews were much more sinned against than the sinners, by arabs (not least the million odd jewish refugees thrown out of arab lands for racist resons, more than outweighing the arabs who left Israel after trying to destroy it ).

Saturday, 19 January 2013

This article is helpful, not because it tells me something new about the depth of hatred muslims have for jews, but because it is an arab woman who is recounting her own experience. Whereas people like Yehosophat Harkabi and Ehud Olmert have seen the problem as being political, muslims indoctrinated since their youth to hate jews see the jewish presence in Israel as being religious, a never ending reminder that holy muslim land is under foreign rule. For those who aspire to see the caliphate arise, this situation is intolerable, a challenge to the koran itself.

Those who are brought up on hatred of jews do not often renounce their racism when older or when they lose religion, but justify it through supposed wrongs Israel does to arabs. They don't need to bother about informing themselves about just how much Israel does for its arab citizens, and how many of those citizens repay Israel with sterling service in protecting Israel's borders, from the druse in the border police to the beduin reconnaisance brigade that are the first to defend against Hamas incursions.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is among a growing number of egyptian such as Maikel Nabil who realise that jews hold no animus for them, that jews live together as equals not masters of muslims in Israel, that far from being a threat to them, Israel is an example they wish to follow. Questioning the genocidal education receive from parents, the media and the state is the first step in their liberation. This young generation of egyptians realise that genocidal anti-semitism is one part of the oppression, one way of control, of externalising problems onto the demonised jew.

Will the be enough in this new generation of egyptians to rid themselves of the Muslim Brotherhood. Most likely not. It didn't happen in Afghanistan, Gaza, Iran, Somalia or anywhere else without outside intervention. Violent islamism knows how to protect its interests. Were the west to pull the plug on muslim countries that embrace islamist then maybe the situation might change. But for now the tide of wahabite financed and western abetted islamic extremism continues to expand (Egypt's islamism is not wahabite, but every bit as extreme however).

Revealed how the Muslim Brotherhood hides behind the Koran to justify antisemitism

Raised on Hatred

By
AYAAN HIRSI ALI

Published: January 17, 2013

EGYPT’S newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was caught on tape
about three years ago urging his followers to “nurse our children and
our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. Not long after, the
then-leader of the Muslim Brotherhood described Zionists as
“bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians,” “warmongers” and
“descendants of apes and pigs.”

These remarks are disgusting, but they are neither shocking nor new. As a
child growing up in a Muslim family, I constantly heard my mother,
other relatives and neighbors wish for the death of Jews, who were
considered our darkest enemy. Our religious tutors and the preachers in
our mosques set aside extra time to pray for the destruction of Jews.

For far too long the pervasive Middle Eastern qualification of Jews as
murderers and bloodsuckers was dismissed in the West as extreme views
expressed by radical fringe groups. But they are not. In truth, those
Muslims who think of Jews as friends and fellow human beings with a
right to their own state are a minority, and are under intense pressure
to change their minds.

Oppression of women and those of different beliefs are the creed of islamists

All over the Middle East, hatred for Jews and Zionists can be found in
textbooks for children as young as three, complete with illustrations of
Jews with monster-like qualities. Mainstream educational television
programs are consistently anti-Semitic. In songs, books, newspaper
articles and blogs, Jews are variously compared to pigs, donkeys, rats
and cockroaches, and also to vampires and a host of other imaginary
creatures.

Consider this infamous dialogue between a three-year-old and a television presenter, eight years before Morsi’s remarks.

Presenter: “Do you like Jews?”

Three-year-old: “No.”

“Why don’t you like them?”

“Jews are apes and pigs.”

“Who said this?”

“Our God.”

“Where did he say this?”

“In the Koran.”

The presenter responds approvingly: “No [parents] could wish for Allah
to give them a more believing girl than she ... May Allah bless her, her
father and mother.”

This conversation was not caught on hidden camera or taped by
propagandists. It was featured on a prominent program called “Muslim
Woman Magazine” and broadcast by Iqraa, the popular Saudi-owned satellite channel.

Who are the 'apes and pigs'?

It is a major step forward for a sitting U.S. administration and leading
American newspapers to unequivocally condemn Morsi’s words. But
condemnation is just the first move.

Here is an opportunity to acknowledge the breadth and depth of the
attitude toward Jews in the Middle East, and how that affects the much
desired but elusive peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.

So many explanations have been offered for the failure of successive
U.S. administrations to achieve that peace, but the answer is in Morsi’s
words. Why would one make peace with bloodsuckers and descendants of
apes and monkeys?

Millions of Muslims have been conditioned to regard Jews not only as the
enemies of Palestine but as the enemies of all Muslims, of God and of
all humanity. Arab leaders far more prominent and influential than Morsi
have been tireless in “educating” or “nursing” generations to believe
that Jews are “the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the
violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and
the offspring of apes and pigs.” (These are the words of the Saudi sheik
Abdul Rahman al-Sudais, imam at the Masjid al-Haram mosque in Mecca.)

In 2011, a Pew survey found that in Turkey, just 4 percent of those
surveyed held a “very favorable” or “somewhat favorable” view of Jews;
in Indonesia, 10 percent; in Pakistan 2 percent. In addition, 95 percent
of Jordanians, 94 percent of Egyptians and 95 percent of Lebanese hold a
“very unfavorable” view of Jews [pdf].

In recent decades Israeli and American administrations negotiated with
unelected Arab despots, who played a double game. They honored the
formal peace treaties by not conducting military attacks against Israel.
But they condoned the Islamists’ dissemination of hatred against
Israel, Zionism and Jews.

As the Islamists spread their influence through civil institutions, young people were nursed on hatred.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, as the people take a chance on
democracy, they and their new leadership want to see their ideals turned
into policy.

For too many of those who fought for their own liberation, one of those
ideals is the end of peace with Israel. The United States must make
clear to Morsi that this is not an option.

This is also a crucial opportunity for the region’s secular movements,
which must speak out against the clergy’s incitement of young minds to
hatred. It is time for these secular movements to start a
countereducation in tolerance.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a fellow at the Belfer
Center’s Future of Diplomacy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, and
author of the books “Infidel” and “Nomad: From Islam to America: A
Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations.”

Concurrent with the destitution of, and ethnic cleansing of sepharadim/arab jews from arab lands (Jews had lived in those countries long before arabs had appeared, at least since the time of destruction of the first Jewish Temple, as far back the 6th century BCE) after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there was also a large and steady immigration of Displaced Persons who were Holocaust survivors.

After Britain had promulgated the White Paper of 1939 immigration had come to a virtual halt for nine years. The White Paper limited immigration to a maximum of 75,000 before the creation of an arab state over all of Israel. As Israel was closed to jews and no other country would take jews in any numbers, Britain sealed the fate of jewish communities in nazi occupied europe.

The British government used its diplomatic power, its embassies and secret services along with its naval might to prevent jews escaping european countries. Boats preparing to leave for Israel were sabotaged. When the germans offered to release a million jews in 1944, a British diplomat (believed to be Anthony Eden) said, "What would I
do with one million Jews?

Britain was complicit in the murder of the jewish people in europe, and had abrogated the Mandate given to it by the League of Nations to create a jewish state. Britain had also been condemned by the Permanent Mandates Commission as being in non compliance with the Mandate so its rule over the land of Israel could henceforth be construed as illegal. But Britain would not go without a fight, and jews who survived the Holocaust would need to wait until Britain left Israel in order to immigrate to Israel.

Golda Meir pps 212-

Perhaps I will be forgiven for citing a few in order to illustrate the scope of the problems we faced. By 1949, 25,000 European Jews had come to Israel from the camps on Cyprus and 75,000 from the DP camps of Germany and Austria. Of the 80,000 Jews living in Turkey at the beginning of 1948, 33,000 were in Israel by the end of 1950........

Each of these migrations, of these mass responses to the establishment of the State of Israel, had its own special history, and each was different. But certainly the airlift of the Jews of Yemen from south-west Arabia to the Jewish state was the most remarkable migration of all. No one knows exactly when the Jews first came to Yemen. It may have been in the days of King Solomon, or perhaps there were Jews who crossed the mountains of Arabia with the Roman troops that fought there at the beginning of the Christian era. At any rate, Jews had lived in Moslem Yemen for many centuries, cut off from the rest of the Jewish world, persecuted, deprived of political rights and impoverished, but always loyal to their faith and to the Bible, which served as their only source of knowledge and learning for hundreds of years. They survived as serfs, as the property of the ruler of Yemen, forbiddenn to work in trades that were open to others, or even to walk on the same side of the street as Moslems. In that backward, bigoted and poverty-stricken country, the Jews were the poorest and lowest of citizens; but unlike the rest of the population, they were literate. In their synagogues and schools, they taught their male children to read and write Hebrew, and I remember that one of my first impressions of the Yemenite Jews was that they were able to read upside down. Because books were so rare, the children, who sat in a circle in the mud-baked huts that served as schools in the Jewish quarters of Yemen, had to learn to read the Bible from every possible angle.

How did they keep themselves alive? They became master craftsmen, silversmiths, jewellers, weavers and carpenters.

Friday, 18 January 2013

Haifa British Intelligence headquarters blown up by the Irgun resistance fighters

The Irgun was decisive in “driving
out” the British from Israel in 1948 (not my terminology but that of Chief of Imperial General Staff
General Montgomery). The Irgun was a true 'band of brothers' unlike
the British and US armies of the time where racism against serving
black people, jews, muslims and any other minority was the norm
rather than the exception.

Sephardim achieved the highest positions
in the Irgun and were counted amongst its bravest fighters. Menahem
Begin's account of the Irgun is essential reading for understanding
how Britain was forced to leave the country despite its imperial wish
to hang on to the land destined for Israel.

The Irgun's success was the first successful anti-imperialist struggle after World War II.

The Revolt – Menahem Begin p78-

We were the melting-pot of the Jewish
nation in miniature. We never asked about origins: we demanded only
loyalty and ability. Our comrades from the eastern communities felt
happy and at home in the Irgun. Nobody ever displayed any stupid airs
of superiority toward them; and they were thus helped to free
themselves of any unjustified sense of inferiority they may have
harboured. They were fighting comrades and that was enough. They
could, and did, attain the highest positions of responsibility.
Shlomo Levi, the first Chief of Staff in the revolt, is a Sephardi.
His brother, “Uzi” on his return from the Eritrea prison-camp,
became Regional Commander at Tel-Aviv and commanded thousands of men
until he fell, fighting heroically, in the decisive battle for Jaffa.
Shimshon, Regional Commander at Haifa until he was betrayed to the
British military authorities, came from Persia. We had a Gideon in
Jerusalem, who led the historic operation against the G.H.Q of the
Occupation Army and led it with consummate bravery and coolness. He
was a Sephardi too. Two of the men who went to the gallows, Alkoshi
and Kashani, were Sephardim. The “smear” with which our enemies
and opponents tried to belittle us, was to us a source of pride.
People who had been humiliated and degraded became proud fighters in
our ranks, free and equal men and women, bearers of liberty and
honour. Statistics? We never counted along these lines. But I believe
I shall be very near the truth if I say that in the various sections
of the Irgun there were no leass than 25% and no more than 35%
Sephardim and members of the Eastern Communities. In the shock Units,
in view of the special emphasis on dark skins, the prooportionn was
probably greater; possibly between 40 and 50%.

Thursday, 17 January 2013

Cathy Come Home - working class poor in Britain had their children taken away and sent to Australia to be used as free labour

A reader's comment included a Haaretz link but the article
is behind a paywall so have not read the article linked below (I have no intention of helping the
anti-zionist Haaretz newspaper with its financial problems. Haaretz recently had one of its columnists Daniel Leby take up the apartheid
calumny, much to the delight of Israel's enemies. Haaretz with its
disappearing Israeli readership (less than 5%) has a long record of
publishing selective and distorted news about Israel and is
understandably the paper of note only for foreign Ngos, the hard
anti-zionist left in Israel and lazy foreign journalists happy to
have their anti-Israel articles written for them).

The reader's comment was as follows:

I accept some of the premise on which
you make this claim. Everybody suffered. But you overlook the removal
of Yemenite children from parents who were told their children had
died.

There is plenty of proof for that. Try
starting from here.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/features/facebook-campaign-seeks-to-keep-missing-yemenite-children-issue-alive.premium-1.493285

There is plenty more in the way of
discrimination going on, but things are much, much better nowadays.
Seeking to cover early Israel in glory is counterproductve to
presenting an honest face to the Jewish State.

on Were sepharadim discriminated
against in the early years of the State of Israel (part 1)?

The Haaretz article introduction says
that only 69 yemenite children were unaccounted for after deaths had
been traced. If that is the case then Israel has little possible case
to answer. 69 adopted yemenite children will be covered by abuse,
violence and simple inability to cope cases. Maybe i'm wrong, so if
you have information beyond the 69 please email me it.

It is of course possible that when the
general state of illiteracy was seen by social workers, and the
sometimes shocking hygiene of some in communities which immigrated to
Israel (read more about this in coming weeks) children may have been
forcibly adopted. With such low numbers of forcible adoptions in
contention, it is hard to take a position on such happenings, whether
there was justification or not.

But when comparisons are made with
other european countries of the time such as Britain and europe it is
possible to gain a better perspective. For example Britain has had a
long and sorry history of taking working-class children away from
parents and having them adopted out, even sending them away to
Australia after telling the children their parents had died.

…...with 903 applications made by
local authorities in January 2012, it is estimated that 10,500
children will be subject to care proceedings by the end of 2012,
which indicates a trend towards the removal of children from their
parents. A forced adoption culture and silencing of birth mothers has
existed across some decades of the 20th century.

Sweden is only now giving in to
pressure to end the forced sterilization of LGBT people, after a
campaign in the European Parliament.

Sweden likewise only in recent times
gave up its forced sterilization of gypsies and Sami women begun in
the 1930's by eugenicists and doctors seeking to rid the 'pure'
swedish gene pool of 'untermenschen'.

As far back as 1919 Herman Lundborg
took his racist “People Types Exhibition” on tour in Sweden which
became the foundation of the Institute of Race Biology (wikipedia
writes: "Swedish racism was an important ideological precursor
for the later Nazism").

These european countries with their
racist eugenicist beliefs attempted either to wipe out 'impure' races or in
Britain's case deport working-class children seen as lesser beings
into effective slavery abroad when they were surplus to requirements
in Britain.

A policy in Israel may or may not have been
adopted that was misguided, and social workers may or may not have taken
children without justification. But one needs to understand the that
they were working in a different age, and were thinking
that what they did was the best for the child's own future rather than as a result of any intention to discriminate against or harm sephardim. That
attitude seems to be still adopted in the UK today.

Whilst every one of those 69 yemenite
children are obviously an open wound to their parents, even if every
one of them was a terrible mistake, it is as nothing to the untold
misery being practised on children in supposedly enlightened european
countries today.

I wonder if you have ever heard of the Sami People? Did you know about the British deportations to Australia? And as a last thought, about the hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi children sold as slaves (sexual and otherwise) in India? Media is very selective, focusing and magnifying the least bit of truth about Israel and we who care about Israel need to be aware of it. That does not mean sweeping mistakes under the carpet, just having some sense of proportion that Israel although in so many respects a light to the world, needs to be given a little slack, needs some understanding even of its imperfections.

I will continue the series of articles
on the ingathering of sephardim to Israel. Forgive me if I still see this as a glorious episode in Israel's history, a feat unmatched ever,
anywhere in the world.

One article had anti-Israel NIF (New Israel Fund) stooges apologising on the behalf of jews and Israelis for an arson attack on a monastery that was very likely the work of an arab or even one of the monks. themselves ( The example of the Tuba-Zangriya libel gives credence to this hypothesis as did the fact that the monastery is far off the road. A nightime arrival of visitors would mean discovery and arrest when the vehicle got back to the highway).I now read( on the excellent Myrightword blog) that the editor of the Jerusalem Post website is moving jobs to an anti-zionist propaganda website. The Jerusalem Post has indeed been badly served. It remains to be seen whether there will be any improvement in the often anti-Israel tenor of reports. The first improvement would be to edit any articles emanating from Reuters rather than posting them whole as usually done until now. Reuters is every bit as bad as the BBC or the infamous Guardian newspaper, as the Roosevelt University study shows. From photoshopping pictures to 'last first' stories which headline Israel's response rather than the initial terrorist attack means that a report by Reuters is assured of being slanted against Israel. From Israel bias to planted stories about supposed Saudi improvements in the rights of women, Reuters is an untrustworthy organisation. The same old stories crop up each year without any real improvement in the lives of saudi women. Reuters-Thompson has important financial links with Saudi Arabia. Any good investigative journalists out there? Reuters is worth a bit of study.

Dear Readers,Noa
Yachot, who has been our managing editor for the last year and a half,
is leaving her position at +972 Magazine and going to work for the American Civil Liberties Union.
During her time with us, Noa helped bring the site to a new level of
professionalism, introduce new fields of coverage, increase the site’s
readership and launch new projects. We all thank her for her dedicated
work and her commitment to the site. Noa will remain part of the +972
collective.Noa will be replaced by editor and blogger Mike Omer-Man, who previously worked as the editor of the Jerusalem Post’s website.

Wednesday, 16 January 2013

Leaving aside the mass media which is
always ready to find dead child victims of Israeli bombing (in the
latest Pillar of Cloud operation the dead children were either killed
by Hamas missiles falling short or 'borrowed' from Syria) there
has not been even a whimper raised about civilian casualties of the French
warplanes. The media seem to be cheering on the French.

It is almost disappointing having waited in vain for the usual 'experts' to be trotted out
to give the line that the sufferings of the palestinians are the
root cause of the conflict, that if only Israel would disappear, so
would the Malian problem. This angle has not emerged yet so I am
raising it myself here in the hope that my expert services will soon
be in great demand by the likes of the BBC (my fees are very modest).

Surely now that hostages have been
taken and the conflict in Mali has been internationalised there must
be a way to blame Israel for all the troubles in Libya? Maybe it is still a little early. It will be surprising if an Israeli
angle isn't found soon.

It would also be interesting to be a fly on
the wall in the White House and the Elysee Palace at the moment. Are politicians and generals kicking themselves and groaning about how stupid they were to
ever think they could change things for the better in the middle
east and africa? Are they bewailing the loss of Mubarak's nasty regime, replaced
by a worse one that can't even pay its own bills?

Are they rethinking the arming of the
islamic militants in Syria, and of the Lebanese army with heavy
weapons and state of the art american sniper rifles (Hezbollah says
“thank you”, two Israeli widows don't). Is Obama wondering
whether he should have stayed out of the folly begun by Cameron and
Sarkozy, the overthrowing of a mad but tamed ex terrorist leader of
Libya?

The leaders of these countries have not
previously shown any sign of having had second thoughts, about their
having destabilised north africa through their regime change in
Libya. So they will probably continue to be sucked into a
prolonged conflict with islamist fanatics in Mali and elsewhere, or just bomb the hell out of the place knowing that their journalists are happier to write their reports about africa from five star hotels in Jerusalem (before ambling down the road to publicise the latest pallywood production).

One thing is certain, France, Britain
and the USA won't get any credit for their troubles. Arabs will
continue to hate western democracies, and denounce the west for
colonising the area for its oil and gas......... And Al Qaida will continue to supply and resupply the terrorists in Mali from the bases kindly provided to them by the willing dupes, Britain, France and America.

It's hard to work up much sympathy for
europeans, especially the french worried about having a terrorist
state abutting europe. Thousands of missiles hitting Israel only
find justification in european countries, as the wages of
'occupation' of the jewish ancestral homelands. France, Britain and other european countries have long been happy to harbour arab terrorists as long as they didn't threaten their own capital cities.

I pray that the european and american
hostages are freed soon (Israel will even now be offering its advice
on how to go about this the best way) and that the French and British
will wake up to their foolishness regarding Israel, their ever
readiness to bomb and kill thousands of miles away from their homes
in the defence of their interests whilst attacking Israel for
defending itself from attacks launched in some cases only a kilometer
away from Sderot in Gaza.

The world needs to rethink their indulging of genocidal arabs, of fanatical muslims who wish to destroy western civilisation after destroying Israel first.

Israel's fight is however the same as that of western civilisation. So it is somewhat ironical that the hopes of middle eastern christians and moderate muslims depend on Israel's survival.

It's all very well bombing fanatics in Mali, but the enemy at home, the wahabite preachers in British mosques are more important for the defence of europe. The madrassas funded by Saudi Arabia need looking into and the British state funded schools which inculcate hatred of the 'Kuffar' (infidel) need closing down.

Obama bows before the king of Saudi Arabia where slavery and abuse of women and children is official policy

Obama informed a journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that Israel is “a small state, already a pariah, and one that may not even survive unless it changes its behaviour.”
Now that Obama feels untouchable in his second term he has at long last come out with some of his true feelings towards Israel. I don't believe he will ever reveal more about the true depth of his hatred of Israel but we must be thankful that Obama has not managed to restrain himself before the Israeli elections in a week's time.

Until now Obama has been clever whilst undermining Israel. He has always expressed his support for Israel whilst having the 'jewish' anti-Israel organisation J Street established to undermine Israel's strong support amongst the american people. Obama always used his minions to attack Israel, and took every opportunity to snub Netanyahu when he came to the USA. Indeed the attacks in the last administration came at times on an almost daily basis. Obama has undermined Israel's security like never before whilst throwing it a bone of extra aid for the 'Iron Dome' and 'security cooperation' (a two way street - Israel only recently used back channels to warn Syria off an attack on Jordan, and Israel's intelligence has been proved to be far superior to that of the USA with regards to Iran. The Israelis were incredulous when the National Intelligence Estimate 2007 stated that Iran had given up its nuclear weapons ambitions. The US which relies on electronic intelligence and the odd turned scientist was very badly misled, as evidenced by recent IAEA reports).

Obama takes the credit for the Iron Dome because it was part funded by the US. Iron Dome a magnificent israeli technological achievment was developed just in time to prevent hundreds or even thousands of israeli deaths when over a thousand islamist Hamas missiles hit Israel in November 2012 (Israel would have needed to develop it in any case without the aid).

But when the effect of Obama's policies are taken into account, of deposing Ghadaffi and thus destabilising the whole of North Africa right up to Sinai (Ghadaffi's anti-tank missiles and heavy guns have appeared in Gaza), handing Egypt to the Muslim Brotherhood sworn to Israel's destruction (just this week we found out about Morsy's "apes and pigs" comments, added to his calls for Jihad before he was elected president).

And now the US is sending 200 more Abrams tanks and 20 more F16 planes to add to the 200 hundred Egypt already possesses. Hezbollah controlled Lebanon is receiving more arms Of course there was that $20 billions arms deal signed only last year with Saudi Arabia, and the intention to supply islamist Turkey at least 100 F35's stealth fighters. Israel might be able to order 20 of them.

Obama makes a show of giving Israel some weapons, but knows that the tiny state of Israel is being in effect swamped by the massive arms transfers to arab states, and by the extreme insecurity now being created as a result of Obama's policies. This includes the hotting up of the Sinai border in the south with lethal attacks on the border road (now closed for a year at least because of the increasing risks to civilians) and missiles fired at Eilat, to the never ending attacks coming from arabs of Gaza and the 'palestinian' territories. The 70,000 missiles pointed at Israel from Lebanon and the ever present menace of Hezbollah, the instability on the border with Syria and the possibility that Jordan will also fall to the islamists in the coming year or two. Added to this is added to the threat from a soon to be nuclear armed Iran with the stated intention of destroying a country the size of Wales, smaller than the state of New Jersey.

Obama's remarks and policies from the very beginning of his first presidency have served to undermine Israel's standing in the middle east (Whilst missing out Israel on his visit to the middle east, Obama stopped off in Cairo to explain how Israel was founded because of the Holocaust. i.e. Jews have no history or right there, that europe just dumped its jews on the arabs, a propaganda point that arabs do not cease making, however incorrect.). Of course one's standing and security in the region is also determined by who your friends are.
Were Israel to lose its best friend and ally, arabs would feel that Israel's destruction as being brought that much closer, with reason. And Obama has worked hard to bring that point home to Israel.
It is possible to go on all day about how Obama has worked to undermine Israel's security. Clever he has been, expressing his full support for Israel's security whilst undermining it.

Indeed contrary to all evidence Obama assures Israel it will be secure if it withdraws from its ancient homelands in Judea and Samaria. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the experience of the withdrawal from Gaza, Lebanon and most of Judea and Samaria showed. Israelis live on just 4% of Judea and Samaria, but they live on the hilltops overlooking Tel-Aviv, Herzliya and Haifa. Arabs never valued the hills which are unproductive, but to destroy Israel it is essential to take the hills from Israel. Obama understands this as well as the arabs. And that is why he has re-interpreted UN resolution 242 to make Israel withdraw from even from the rump of its ancient lands.

Obama can take some painful actions against Israel, not least at the UN. But Netanyahu must stand firm about now building up Judea and Samaria in the face of continued violence against jews and the near daily genocidal comments and praise for terrorists with much jewish blood on their hands. Abbas the so-called 'moderate' has lately also come out with praise for those who killed. No surprise but he has also dropped the mask.

Netanyahu who although a great speaker and communicator has shown himself weak, has fully supported his defence minister Barak a convinced appeaser who set himself against the return of jewish life to Judea and Samaria and acted tirelessly to destroy outposts and even settlements.

The good news is that the Israeli public has had enough. Israelis want no more of empty promises of peace, and now realise that in the middle east peace comes through the barrel of a gun, not through giving away territory and begging for peace. The coming elections will reinforce the nationalists and send a message to the world that Israel will not commit suicide by handing any more essential strategic territory to enemies whose appetite is never sated.

So we should thank Obama for finally informing us of his feelings towards 'pariah' Israel. Some of us realised what this man was about when he chose Cairo to attack Israel from, if not sooner. Israel will now take Obama's exhortations to heart and indeed change its behaviour, although maybe not in the way the author of the remarks intended.

Israel's future is looking more assured now its people is becoming more united. Europe is a dying continent that has lost its will to survive. The people of the USA are different. Americans have an inherent understanding of their place in history and they identify with Israel as being part of that history. American feelings for Israel are reflected in Congress' lengthy standing ovations to Netanyahu even whilst Obama was lambasting it and trying to impose a new concept of 1967 'borders' (i.e. the 1949 armistice lines) on Israel. Obama lost that battle (thank you Canada) as he lost the battle to throttle the continued building jewish life in a tiny part of Judea and Samaria (arabs control the overwhelming mass of the area contrary to the propaganda).

A united political front in Israel will after the election resist Obama and other enemies of the Jewish People. With so many other problems in the world, an Obama chastened by previous encounters with Netanyahu will most likely not be able to cause too much damage to Israel.